


A Genuine Fake

by rainshaded



Category: The Worst Witch (TV 2017)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Dimity POV, F/F, Hackle Summer Trope Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25787290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainshaded/pseuds/rainshaded
Summary: The Great Wizard expects a ceremony investing Miss Hardbroom as Deputy Headmistress. Dimity suggests they invent one.
Relationships: Ada Cackle/Hecate Hardbroom
Comments: 8
Kudos: 36
Collections: The Hackle Summer Trope Challenge





	A Genuine Fake

**Author's Note:**

> I took one year of Latin nearly twenty years ago. The Latin in this fic is therefore generated via Google and I apologise for any egregious errors.

Ultimately, it could all be blamed on the Great Wizard, Dimity concluded, and hoped like hell that argument would be convincing if she was ever challenged.

It had been a particularly chaotic end of term as the school said goodbye not only to its fifth years but also its headmistress. Whilst moving into her mother’s vacated office, Miss Cackle had found time to send a short note to the Magic Council informing them that she was appointing Miss Hardbroom as her Deputy Headmistress and apparently thought no more of it. Until she received a reply almost a week later (with impeccable timing, the day before Dimity was due to depart for her much-deserved holiday): the Great Wizard was very pleased to hear it, high hopes of a smooth handover, bright future, the strength of our traditions is the strength of our society, blah blah blah, and therefore he would be arriving tomorrow at noon to attend the traditional investment ceremony.

Dimity frowned. “What ceremony? There isn’t normally a ceremony for deputies, is there?”

Ada looked up from the message. Her blue eyes were clouded; Hecate stood like a statue at her shoulder. “My thoughts exactly. I was rather hoping you might be able to tell me...?”

To Dimity’s relief, she was looking at Gwen. To Dimity’s not-relief, Gwen was not looking as if she was on the verge of springing forward with an easy answer that would satisfy the Great Wizard and allow Dimity to depart as planned.

“Not to my knowledge.” She frowned. “Of course the last Cackle to appoint a deputy headmistress would have been your great-great-grandmother... there might be something in the records?”

Ada’s shoulders slumped. Hecate’s lips tightened. 

“Ah.” Gwen said. “Do I take it you already looked?”

“‘Miss Moonshine appointed as Deputy Headmistress, all well’,” Hecate quoted. “We could perhaps do with a _tad_ more detail.”

Ada sighed. “They were all like that. I feel sure that Mother would have mentioned it if there was to be another ceremony but...”

“You don’t want to start your term telling the Great Wizard he’s wrong.”

“Exactly.”

The silence threatened to stretch. Motivated by the prospect of either abandoning her colleagues in an hour of need or cutting into her holiday (and possibly the new broomsticks she’d been promised if the council agreed the funding), inspiration struck for Dimity. “So give him a ceremony.” Three sets of eyes turned upon her. “I mean, if he’s expecting one, why not?”

“Dimity, that’s brilliant!” Gwen clapped her hands. “Something old, something in Latin: he won’t understand. It just has to sound right.”

“And look right,” Dimity added. “Very important ceremony, this. We need decoration.”

Hecate winced. “I hardly think the Great Wizard wishes to see a gaudy—”

“And solemn,” Dimity amended hurriedly. “Important and solemn. Very serious decoration. ” Helping her colleagues might be the right thing to do but that didn’t mean she couldn’t also have fun with it.

Ada turned her head to look up at Hecate and they searched each other’s faces.

“All right,” Ada said, turning back. “Gwen, can we leave finding a suitable incantation with you? We still have a lot of handover work to complete.”

“Of course.” Gwen nodded. “And Dimity will help me.”

Dimity turned with her most piteous face on.

“Don’t give me that look.” Gwen tutted. “It’ll be quicker with two. Plenty of time to decorate after.”

* * *

Dimity understood exactly as much Latin as she needed to, in the normal course of things. It wasn’t much and, in these circumstances, she was finding it a little unequal to the task.

She sighed deeply—which Gwen, well within earshot, completely ignored—and turned the page. And again, two laborious minutes later.

 _amicum et socium nostrum?_ Well, it sounded hopeful. Better than _impetu turbare hostium_ , at least. The quicker they found something, the quicker they could get on to the fun part of organising this charlatan of a ceremony.

“How about this?”

Gwen turned from the shelves she was perusing and made her way back to the table. Dimity passed the book up to her. She’d suggested a few candidates already but Gwen, with her far greater comprehension, had deemed them unsuitable.

Squinting at the page through her glasses, Gwen read “ _Hodie nobis_... no, I don’t think... oh. Hmm.” Her eyes flicked back to the top of the page and she seemed to read it through again, and again. Dimity waited. Finally, there was a decisive nod. “Yes, Dimity, I think this is actually an ideal candidate.”

Dimity grinned and hurriedly stood, gathering armfuls of books before Gwen could change her mind.

* * *

All right, when it came to it, Dimity had to admit that not holding the ceremony in the Great Hall made sense. Yes, a ceremony with five people might seem a little dwarfed in that space. No, they couldn’t conjure up an audience: short notice aside, the fewer people who participated in this charade the better. Yes, given the focus of the ceremony, it made sense to use Miss Cackle’s office and the smaller space would lend weight to the supposed tradition of the intimacy of the ceremony. Dimity accepted this all and made plans to express her thwarted ambition at Halloween, when HB would be particularly appreciative.

In the end, her decoration was almost restrained enough even for Hecate’s conservative tastes. Burgundy drapes isolated the upper section of the office and lights embedded in them cast a warm glow over the space. Similarly-coloured organza fell as a curtain halfway up the stairs. The temptation had been strong but she had heroically resisted any kind of banner. Some people just couldn’t accept nice things and having them writ large would not, she suspected, endear Hecate to such sentiments. She had, however, appropriated one of the potion bottles from the potions lab and one of Miss Cackle’s many many ornaments already distinguishing the office from her mother’s occupancy. They sat next to each other on the desk, which had been pushed back against the balustrade to allow space for the ceremony to take place.

“Why”—Hecate appeared after her first elongated word and Dimity hoped that meant she hadn’t seen how she’d jumped at the unexpected voice—“have you taken my duplication potion? One of you is quite enough.”

“Ouch, HB. And here I am doing a nice thing for you.”

“I hardly call purloining my possessions nice.”

“Borrowing! I would have asked permission but I thought you were busy working with Miss Cackle and I hardly like to interrupt an important Deputy Headmistress.”

Aha. The change in expression was minute, easily missed, but Dimity was an experienced HB-watcher by now and knew her words had had the intended, slightly mollifying effect. “What do you need it for? I thought the ceremony—”

“Its presence is purely symbolic,” Dimity said reassuringly. “The actual potion itself is irrelevant.” She’d had no idea what it was, just picked an unmarked bottle she liked the look of. Of course Hecate knew, though, and had spotted its absence on a still crowded shelf in a minute. “Feel free to substitute if you need it.”

Hecate simply transferred away again. Dimity took that as permission.

* * *

It was a beautiful summer’s day, if a little breezy on the parapet. The sky was an endless expanse of blue, clear of clouds and, frustratingly, Great Wizards. Dimity checked her watch: ten past noon. She stared into the sky. As the wind died a little, she could make out snippets of Hecate and Ada’s conversation from where they stood round the corner, monitoring another patch of sky.

“...lying to the _Great Wizard_ , Ada.”

“More, presenting what he wants to see. I admit it’s not ideal but I trust Gwen and Dimity...”

Dimity had had a few last-minute doubts herself but really, everything would be fine. All they were doing was marking the significance of HB taking on extra responsibilities within the school in the way they chose, which happened to be somewhat elaborate. Any meaning the Great Wizard inferred from this was entirely down to him. If he should mention attending a ceremony to invest the new Deputy Headmistress of Cackle’s, very few people would know any better and those that might, such as Mrs Cackle, would surely assume the occasion had been what it was in fact, simply a signifier.

“...not worth it. You could have left it. It would have been fine.”

“So you said before. And I disagreed then too. I’m not the kind of superwitch my mother thought she was and I’m happy to say so. Weak, perhaps, but honest. If you’re to perform the duties of Deputy, I insist you receive the title, recognition and pay, such as it is. Anything less is doing you a disservice. And if I have to speak some benign incantation in front of the Great Wizard in order to secure such, well... cheap at twice the price.”

If the gap had been any longer, Dimity would have thought to move away but she had barely caught her breath when Hecate’s reply came, low and fierce with sincerity in a way she had rarely heard.

“I think you are the least weak person I have ever met.”

A slighter longer pause. “Thank you, Hecate. That means a lot.” Another pause and now Ada's tone had changed, was lighter. “Especially since you’ve seen me with a plate of biscuits!”

There was silence following this. Dimity's attention was diverted by a dot in the sky, rapidly resolving itself into the figure of the Great Wizard. Finally.

* * *

The ceremony itself went without a hitch. Ada and Hecate stood in front of the desk as Gwen read the words from the scroll she had copied them onto and they repeated them in turn. Dimity paid little attention, watching the Great Wizard out of the corner of her eye for any signs he was about to rise to his feet and declaim them all fraudsters who were definitely not getting any funding. His expression remained neutral, a Great Wizard sitting through an expected and undramatic event. Dimity might have slightly zoned out, lulled by the Great Wizard's stillness and the level voices of her colleagues reciting incomprehensible words, because it was a real jolt of adrenaline when he did stand. Ada and Hecate dropped their joined hands and turned to face him but it took a moment for Dimity to focus on what he was saying and calm her racing heart.

“...sorry I can’t stay longer, Ada, but you know how things are. Congratulations again, Miss Hardbroom. Goodbye, Miss Bat, Miss Drill.”

Dimity got to her feet and bowed, joining in with Gwen's “Goodbye, Your Greatness.”

Ada patted her on the arm as she passed, following the Great Wizard with Hecate at her side. It was a simple gesture of thanks that she'd dispensed many times before but it hit Dimity like a bolt. She collapsed back in her chair, staring into nothing as the magic surged through her, and, as the office door shut behind them, found the breath to say, “What was that?”

“As I suspected.”

Gwen, Dimity belatedly realised, looked like the cat who got the cream.

“What did that spell _do_? It’s got a kick like a bucking broomstick.”

“It was a perfectly ordinary bonding spell.”

“I've been to _weddings_ that didn’t feel like that.”

As an awareness of her own words trickled through Dimity’s mind, they dislodged a long-buried nugget from a Spell Science textbook: ‘ _While spells today are almost always crafted to focus on the internal magic of the caster and thus limit their capabilities, it was common in the past for spells to draw upon magic in the immediate environment...’_ Her gaze fell upon the paired ornaments sitting upon the desk, Miss Cackle's rose-holding mouse and HB's bottle of... “Duplication potion. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no.”

“Oh, is that what that is?”

“What do we _do_?”

“I thought you were keen to get away on holiday.”

Dimity gaped. “Just _leave_?”

“Are you planning to spend the whole holiday waiting on tenterhooks for the Great Wizard to tumble to it?”

“No, I was more concerned about—” The words _accidentally marrying our colleagues to each other_ stuck in her throat, refusing to face the world. She gestured wildly to the potion instead.

“Dimity, you know as well as I that mutual bonding spells cannot exceed the limits the participants wish, no matter how strong the magic. I assure you, they didn’t need any help.”

“You _planned_ this?”

Gwen waved a hand. “I wasn't sure but I took an opportunity, thanks to the Great Wizard and your excellent suggestion. I am an old woman, Dimity, and I know the importance of taking your opportunities where you can. I'm sure Ada and Hecate will come to the same realisation soon enough.”

Dimity dropped her head into her hands, cursing the Great Wizard, her lack of Latin, and crafty old crones meddling in that which should not concern them. “I'm an innocent bystander.”

“Indeed. You might like to stand somewhere else.”

Upon reflection, Dimity decided that course of action had merit. Whatever was going to happen next, she didn’t want to know about it.


End file.
